Waltzing from the Bard to 'Matilda'

Fans of Broadway musicals, meet Matt Harrington — rising New York stage star, Point Loma High grad and honorary British citizen (or one in the making, anyway). ■ Harrington isn’t scheduled to be knighted quite yet, but the Brits are showing the busy actor a lot of love these days. ■ For three months starting last November, the 32-year-old was the sole American in the just-closed Broadway productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III.” Those much-buzzed shows originated in London with the theater company Shakespeare’s Globe (no relation to San Diego’s Old Globe), which brought them to New York.

Now, Harrington is about to leap into another British import on Broadway — this time a hit musical.

On Tuesday, he will step into the cast of “Matilda,” in the prime role of Mr. Wormwood. It’s the locally trained acting prodigy’s biggest career moment yet — not to mention a role for which his predecessor, Gabriel Ebert, won a Tony Award last year.

For those who knew Harrington in San Diego, the Shakespeare success is likely less surprising than his foray into musical theater.

For two years running, in 1998 and 1999, Harrington won the area Shakespeare competition held by the English-Speaking Union, a literacy and theater advocacy group.

The second time, he also won the national competition — beating out 54 other contestants and becoming a hero on the Point Loma campus. (A U-T story from that time describes a football player pointing out Harrington to teammates at the school and saying: “That dude is the Shakespeare champ. Pretty cool, huh?”)

And while he hasn’t remotely lost his regard for the Bard, Harrington admits he has long had “this secret fantasy of doing musicals.” In fact, he performed in them as an ensemble member during a couple of summers with the now-defunct Starlight Musical Theatre in Balboa Park. (A castmate in a 1998 production of “Hello, Dolly!” was future “American Idol” star Adam Lambert.)

As for doing musicals on Broadway: “I never really thought I would go down that road,” he says. “But I always thought they looked like so much fun. There’s that whole idea that when you can’t speak anymore, when you can’t express yourself through words, you sing. There’s something so expressive about them.

“And there’s a similarity, I think, between the two — I mean, they’re both great forms of high expression, Shakespeare and musical theater,” he adds. “There’s not a lot of subtext to them. They’re both so big and so full, and they call for a full commitment to whatever it is you’re doing onstage. They’re brimming with life.”

For all of Harrington’s recent Broadway success, late bloomers can take heart in his story: He didn’t start acting until high school, and even then it was because he was more or less on the rebound from an abortive foray into high-school government. (Maybe Richard III could have taught him a thing or two about seizing power.)

Harrington had been focusing on computer science and student government at Keiller Middle School (now Keiller Leadership Academy) before heading to Point Loma, in a part of town where he didn’t know anyone.

So he ran for student office, and “lost by a landslide.” (His mother, Rhoda Auer, who’s now Shakespeare coordinator for the local chapter of the ESU, recalls that he earned three votes.)

Then he tried out for indoor soccer; also a disaster.

But “I remember what I really had a tenacity for was finding my own thing,” Harrington says now. “I was never content to just go to school and come home; I really wanted to find my niche.”

Just about that time, someone told him the school production of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” was still being cast. “So I went in for the play, and it just clicked,” Harrington says. “That was it.”

The late actor and teacher Priscilla Allen essentially discovered him, and became a mentor and major influence.

Harrington’s Shakespeare glory was to come (he won with a comic monologue from “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” and duly credited his mother in the subsequent U-T story for taking him to plays at the Old Globe when he was growing up).

Harrington went on to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at New York University, a prime training ground for actors. But while he and friends at one point staged a do-it-yourself production of “Julius Caesar” in the East Village — funding it with a series of keg parties — it wasn’t until Shakespeare’s Globe came calling that he made his professional debut with the Bard.

In between, he did some commercial work, appearing at one point in an anti-teen-drinking spot with University of San Diego/Old Globe MFA grad Jim Parsons, now an Emmy-winning star of “The Big Bang Theory.” (“We both have a nonthreatening, quirky-white-guy vibe,” Harrington says of their similarities.)

In 2012, Harrington joined his first Broadway production as an understudy in “Harvey,” a show that starred Parsons.

His breakthrough roles in the all-male, strictly period “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III” (starring Tony-winner Mark Rylance) were massive undertakings, requiring Harrington to play six roles and understudy six others.

So his work in “Matilda” as the book-loving title heroine’s demanding dad ought to be simpler, if not exactly a breeze.

“There’s the general level of anxiety that comes with these things,” Harrington says. “But more than fear, (Mr. Wormwood) is such a fun part.

“It really is one of those dream roles. Like getting to test-drive a Ferrari.”